Jeremy England

Jeremy England is an American physicist and Orthodox rabbi. He is noted for his argument that the spontaneous emergence of life may be explained by the better heat dissipation of more organized arrangement of molecules compared to that of groups of less organized molecules. England terms his interpretation "dissipation-driven adaptation".

Early life and conversion to Orthodox Judaism

England was born in Boston, MassachusettsFaculty biography of Jeremy England
, MIT Dept. of Physics, accessed Jan. 9, 2015. and raised in a college town in New Hampshire.Meet the Orthodox Jewish physicist rethinking the origins of life
by Simona Weinglass, The Times of Israel, October 29, 2015. His mother was the daughter of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, while his father was a non-observant Lutheran. He was raised Jewish but did not seriously study Judaism and the Torah until he attended graduate school at Oxford University. He now considers himself an Orthodox Jew who has been inspired by Zionism.

England attended the Research Science Institute at MIT in the summer of 1998. He earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Harvard in 2003. After being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, England studied at St. John's College, Oxford, from 2003 until 2005. He earned his Ph.D. in physics at Stanford in 2009 under Vijay S. Pande, where he was supported by a Hertz Fellowship. In 2011, he joined MIT as an assistant professor of physics; subsequently, he was associate professor of physics from 2017 until 2019. In 2019, he left MIT to join GlaxoSmithKline as a senior director in artificial intelligence and machine learning; he was promoted to vice president in 2023. He was a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech from 2020 until 2023, when he joined Bar-Ilan University as a visiting professor of physics.
In February 2025, he left GSK to found Conquest Labs.

Views on Palestinians

In 2008 England wrote an article for ''The Stanford Review'' that contested Palestinians' right to the land occupied by Israel since 1948. He expressed a desire to see Palestinians removed from this occupied territory, wishing the refugees of the Nakba "well in finding homes outside the Land of Israel". In 2024 England wrote an article for Tablet Magazine in which he advocated for the conquest, annexation, and settling of the Gaza Strip by Jews and Zionist-sympathizing gentiles, stating that Jews may kill those who are innocent with the rabbinic justification that "it is correct to kill even the righteous among your enemy."

Theoretical work

England has developed a hypothesis of the physics of the origins of life, based on a mechanism which he calls ''dissipation-driven adaptation''. The hypothesis holds that random groups of molecules can self-organize to more reliably absorb and dissipate heat from the environment, and that such self-organizing systems are an inherent part of the physical world.

In popular culture

A fictionalized version of England and his theory are featured in the novel ''Origin'' by Dan Brown. England, who is an Orthodox Jew and ordained rabbi, has written that he strongly rejects Brown's depiction of him as being a scientist who is unconcerned with spiritual matters.

Awards

England was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and Hertz fellow in 2003. In 2012, he was featured in ''Forbes'' 30 Under 30 for his scientific achievements. In 2021, he received the Irwin Oppenheim Award from the American Physical Society alongside Sumantra Sarkar.

See also

* Energy rate density
* Maximum power principle
* Howard T. Odum

References

Forbes.com seems to have lost most of the content on his profile and lists a broken link to the 2012 30-under-30 in Science. The Hertz Foundation profile mentions the 2018 Forbes 30-under-30. However, neither th
2012
nor th
2018
official listing pages on Forbes.com list England.

Further reading

*

*

External links

Lab websiteJeremy England discusses his theory of pre-biological evolution and the emergence of complexity in non-living systems
- Interview on the 7th Avenue Project radio show
What is life
lecture by Jeremy England on 9 September 2014 at the Karolinska Institutet
DR. JEREMY ENGLAND: WHAT DOES A SCIENTIST SEE IN THE TORAH?
- Interview to 18Forty podcast in 2020
Is This Land Your Land?
- Article on the Stanford Review in 2008 questioning the legitimacy of Palestine's right to land

{{DEFAULTSORT:England, Jeremy
1982 births
Living people
American Orthodox Jews
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
21st-century American physicists
Jewish American physicists
Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty
Harvard College alumni
Stanford University alumni
American Rhodes Scholars
Alumni of St John's College, Oxford